Emerald Weapon & Ruby Weapon · Final Fantasy VII · PlayStation · 1997 · Optional Superboss
Two monsters that exist entirely outside the plot, are vastly harder than the game's actual final boss, and can be safely ignored forever — which is exactly why people fight them.
Final Fantasy VII contains an ending that most players reach, and two creatures that most players never touch. Emerald Weapon sits on the ocean floor, encountered only by taking a submarine down and making physical contact with it — a collision the player can avoid entirely by keeping the sub near the surface. Ruby Weapon buries itself in the sand near the Gold Saucer and only surfaces after Ultimate Weapon has been defeated and one further random battle fought. Neither is required. Neither is mentioned in the ending. The plot proceeds identically whether they live or die. What they are is a difficulty statement. Both are dramatically harder than Sephiroth, the game's actual final boss, and both punish the party compositions and Materia setups that carried the player comfortably through the story. Emerald imposes a time limit unless a specific accessory is equipped and scales its damage to the number of Materia the party is carrying — meaning the player who has hoarded the most power is the player it punishes hardest. Ruby ejects two of the player's three party members at the start of the fight, forcing a solo opening against an enemy that can casually erase a fully-levelled character. Beating them requires understanding Final Fantasy VII's systems at a depth the sixty-hour main narrative never once demands.
The Weapons work because they attack the player's habits rather than the player's reflexes. Emerald Weapon's damage output scales with the amount of Materia equipped, which turns the game's core progression loop into a liability — the natural instinct to load every character with every powerful ability is precisely the instinct that gets the party annihilated. Ruby Weapon opens by removing two of the three party members, so any strategy built on a balanced trio collapses in the first turn.
Neither can be brute-forced by grinding levels, and that is the point. They are exams on the material the main game taught but never tested: Materia combination, status immunity, damage cancellation, the arithmetic of the game's own formulae. A player who beat Sephiroth by levelling up and pressing Attack has learned almost nothing that will help here, and the Weapons exist to make that gap visible.
Optional superbosses were not new in 1997 — Final Fantasy had experimented with them before, and Japanese RPGs had long hidden brutal secret encounters in their late game. What was new was the scale of the audience. Final Fantasy VII sold to millions of people who had never played a JRPG, and it presented them with two enemies that were confidently, deliberately beyond them, and which the game made no attempt to explain or signpost.
That established an expectation the genre has never let go of. The idea that a well-made RPG owes its most committed players a wall to break themselves against — content that exists purely as a difficulty artefact, offering nothing but a trophy weapon and the knowledge that you did it — runs through the two decades of the genre that followed. The Weapons are the reason a generation of players understands, instinctively, that the credits are not the end of the game.